The Natural Way To Draw

"His book, based on his teaching in the 1920s and ’30s at the Art Students’ League in New York City, was really important to me in high school when I was learning how to draw. Much of what I found in subsequent books on the topic—for example Betty Edwards’ Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain —comes straight from Nicolaides. A lot of people who teach drawing today maybe don’t even realise how much of what they teach really comes from Nicolaides, he was so prescient in so many ways. One of the main messages of his book is that you have to feel what the model is doing. Drawing involves more than looking at the model in some sort of clinical way. In order to make a drawing that really communicates the action of the person that you’re drawing from life, for example, you have to feel that action in your own body. That idea of sensing action is prescient on so many levels. More recent research in developmental psychology has revealed the way that motor action precedes and facilitates cognitive development. Cognitive scientists today understand cognition as embodied, that thinking is active in the sense that it involves our whole body’s interaction with the world. When we watch an action closely, we’re simulating that action in our minds. Nicolaides understood embodied cognition intuitively, using it as his starting point in teaching drawing. His drawing method built on that understanding on a phenomenological level, before the neuroscience existed. What’s intriguing is that current neuroscience vindicates his view."